5:45 to Suburbia

by Packer, Vin

  “Very good, papa-doodle. I’m glad I voted for you.”

  Again, he looked around him; then he said, “Want me to light your cigarette?”

  “I’d like a cigarette,” she said. “I’m out of matches. Used them all damn up.”

  He said, “I’ll help you.” He opened his door, testing her reaction.

  “Okay?” he asked.

  “You’re nice, papa-doodle,” she answered.

  While he got out of the front seat and moved into the back seat he saw her drink again from the bottle, a long drink.

  She smoked the cigarette he lit for her, one or two drags — then its ash grew long as it rested between her fingers on her lap, and she drank more while he watched her.

  When the cigarette fell from her fingers onto her coat, he pushed it to the floor and squashed it with his foot, then placed his hand back on her coat, over her thigh.

  He said, “Bet you got on a pretty dress, nice lady like you.”

  “You’re nice, papa-doodle,” she said. “What time you got to be home, papa-doodle?”

  “No time,” he said, opening her coat.

  “You going to stay the night?” she said. “Huh, papa-doodle?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sure, mamma-doodle.” Gently he pushed her back down on the seat. She was docile as he prepared her; out cold as he relieved himself.

  • • •

  But the next morning, when miraculously she had awakened in her hide-a-bed and tried to remember getting there from the Village, she remembered suddenly the name “Roosevelt”; then for some slow minutes nothing more than the name; until from the depths of her memory came the black hands working on her clothes, the feeling of cold leather on her bare skin; and a long while after an angry voice commanding her to “Put them on now, damn it! You got to look right when I drop you! Or you’ll get out now. I’ll leave you here!”

  She remembered being scared of his voice, wondering who he was, wanting desperately to get awake enough to obey him, fearing desertion, wanting to work her fingers and dress herself — and somehow being able to.

  She remembered sitting up in the seat because he snapped: “Sit up, damn it! You got to sit up. Act like a fare!”

  She remembered whimpering as he drove, wondering why he was mean.

  The next morning, she remembered and suddenly she knew what she had done, knew the nadir she had reached. And while she poured a drink, standing naked in her kitchenette, staring out at the cold, impersonal stone towers of Manhattan, she couldn’t even cry, or jump from the ledge she stood before, or pray, or ask for help from anyone. Who, anyway? She could do nothing but reach behind her for a refill.

  • • •

  At noon, Marge Mann remembered, then stopped remembering that, and dug down into her bucket bag for the flask.

  The door of her office was closed, but she drank from the flask in a quick, furtive way; drank deeply. God, it felt good. By now she knew she was through at Cadence, and wondered what induced that homely secretary of Bruce Cadence’s to sneak down and warn her. Always thought she looked like a Polish maid on Sunday, the way she dressed in those ugly satin blouses and frizzed her hair; God, the bourbon went down fine. Well, what was she going to do, for the love of dear Christ. Canned at sixty. Hand in your resignation. What the hell was that ugly Scott bag misty-eyed about? What the hell was going on? Hands are shaking. Charlie will notice at lunch hands are shaking. Play it cool at lunch; never let him know how it feels on the ash-heap; not Charlie. Loved him once. How’d everything get so old so quick? Just going to sit there at lunch and play it down; won’t even take a drink; show Charlie they’re wrong; get the whizz down now and won’t even take a drink; got mints in my change purse; clear my breath. God, what now? Scared, God, scared; shaking — shaking —

  • • •

  Dear Janie. Charlie composed the letter in his mind as he put on his overcoat and headed for lunch. I’ve never refused you anything, have I? But it hurts me to have you ask for money to — Dear Janie, if you try to carry out your plans for going to Europe with that shiftless Harvard boy, I’m going to write your dean and —

  Janie dearest, I’m catching the next train to Radcliffe and —

  Dean of Women

  Radcliffe College

  Cambridge, Mass.

  Madam:

  It has been called to my attention that my daughter —

  “Happy birthday, Mr. Gibson,” someone shouted as he neared the elevators.

  Charlie saw Bonnie, and the girl with her who was beaming at him. He said to the girl, “Thank you.”

  Dearest Janie, I love you so. Don’t hurt yourself this way —

  Then someone was tugging at his sleeve, pulling him aside in a confidential way. Looking down, he saw Bonnie.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “Well, the memo? Marge Mann.”

  “I have to fire her,” Charlie said.

  Bonnie murmured, “Dear God!”

  Dear Janie, Charlie thought; while the mind’s versatility summoned up some bygone memory of a hide-a-bed, a bourbon, and the sensual smell of a woman after love; then flung an accusation at him: Janie never had a chance. You were having an affair when she was growing up. Needed her father — any psychologist would tell you; followed by miscellaneous remembered sentences: “Look, Charlie, I think Bruce would like it better if you presented it this way … Marge, I love you … Joan, I love you … it has been called to my attention that the editor of our shelter magazine …” And over and above it all: “Going down! Down elevator!”

  “Down!” Charlie Gibson yelled from the nadir of his daze, rushing to the end car, “Down!”

  God damn it, Janie, don’t be such a common little slut!

  MARCH 6, 1957

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “WHAT I can’t get over,” Dudley Q. Davis told Jayne Gibson at noon on March the sixth, “is that it’s such a cliché situation.”

  “I know it,” she said, “It’s almost as bad as ‘thank you for just being Harry.’ “

  They both nodded somewhat dismally. They stirred their coffees and stared at their cigarettes, remembering that night they had first met — months and months ago — right here in this very restaurant in Greenwich Village….

  There had been a rather large group of them — over eight — with no one particularly paired-off, and Jayne and Dudley had sat at the very end of the long table, beside a couple at another table. Neither one had said much to the other, until they had overheard the conversation between the couple.

  The woman, a thin, once-pretty, spinsterish type, had obviously been taken to dinner by a salesman for her concern; a large, jolly, flamboyant fellow whose name was Harry.

  As they were finishing their dessert, she glanced up at him and said in a sacred tone, “Thank you, Harry.”

  Harry had guffawed good-naturedly. “For what? For this little old dinner? This is nothing! You don’t have to thank me, Florence. This is nothing! Why thank me?”

  After a pause, and in that same hallowed tone, the woman responded, “Thank you for just being Harry.”

  Dudley and Jayne both heard it, and both had the same reaction — a terrible, nearly overwhelming urge to burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

  And it was while they were restraining themselves, after they had both sensed one another’s reaction, that they first looked very deeply into each other’s eyes.

  And Dudley Q Davis thought: That’s a very cute kid across from me.

  And Jayne Gibson thought: I bet he has the same sense of humor I do.

  And they began talking, talking and laughing, and telling one another about cliché things they had done, said, or overheard. But mostly they only admitted that they had overheard them; or that someone had done a certain thing to them (been dumb enough to) that was so cliché they were both hysterical thinking about it.

  “I remember this girl I was taking out,” Dudley had said. “She was a Smith pig. Well, I took her o
ut a couple of times — I don’t know — and we necked around, but I was never very serious, and she was. I could tell by her breathing.”

  “Oh, no! Really?”

  “Sure you know; huh-huh, huh-huh, huh-huh,” Dudley imitated the sound and Jayne Gibson squealed, “Oh, how aw-ful! Really?”

  “Sure,” Dudley said, “but that’s not the cliché … One night, see, I was kissing her good night, and my mind wasn’t exactly on it. Anyway, she realizes this, and she comes out of the clinch and stares up at me with this real dewey-eyed look. She looks at me like that for a while, and then she says, ‘Dudley?’

  “‘What?’ says I.

  “‘Dudley,’ she says, ‘Who hurt you?’ That’s just what she said, and I said, ‘What do you mean?’ … Well, wait until you hear this. She says, ‘Someone hurt you a long time ago, didn’t they? Who hurt you, Dudley?’ … Get that, for God’s sake. Right out of the soap operas!”

  Jayne Gibson hooted, and Dudley slapped his knee three times and threw his head back, laughing.

  When the hysteria over that was terminated, Jayne spoke:

  “I was out with a fellow once — he was a Yale man, and he was more or less stuck on me, but I just didn’t get any message whatsoever from him. Anyway, we’d be together-say for a whole evening, and at some point or other during the evening, when there was a lapse in our conversation, or when we’d been chasing around dancing or running back and forth to the football stadium, he’d suddenly reach for my hand — and in this doleful tone — honestly, Dud, I wish you could have heard him — he’d say: ‘I miss you.’ … Ughhh, I mean — it was aw-ful! So gooey!”

  More hysteria; then —

  “I used to go with a girl like that,” Dudley said. “She was from Bennington, I remember. She was always stopping in the middle of something we were doing — in the movies, or restaurants, or even reading out at her summer cottage, and she’d look real coy at me and wrinkle her nose and say, ‘Hi!’ … Oh, God, let me tell you!”

  And on and on it went, that night and nights to follow — Dudley Q. Davis and Jayne Gibson, teamed up against the vulgar, the stereotype, the cliché; their accord so perfectly mutual that often around other people they would suddenly became convulsed with this mad laughter that lent magic to their togetherness, and go rushing out of a room, bent double, while the others stared after them murmuring usualities like: “What hit them?”

  Or: “Let us in on the joke, too?”

  Or: “Must be a private joke.”

  And still shaking, off and away from the thing that had amused them so hilariously, they looked at one another proudly, with a feeling of utter, unique purity of intelligence and wit and subtle sophistication.

  They were a team, and envied as such. Not alone for the fact that Dudley was very tall, extremely handsome with dark hair, flashing white teeth, and bright blue eyes; that Jayne was quite short, gamin-beautiful, and what Dud’s colleagues termed “stacked and packed,” and together they created that lovely aura of physical pulchritude that all such pairs do; but envied too because they seemed to possess some superior secret unavailable to the commoners, who neither looked like them, laughed as much as they did, or seemed so certainly satisfied within the cocoon of their individual pairs.

  Everyone who knew them knew of their love, long before Jayne Gibson and Dudley Q. Davis knew it.

  And everyone would have cried indignantly, “Preposterous!” if they were to know that love between this splendid couple came as a surprise to both of them; and that furthermore, neither one had ever been in love before, not even involved before, the way they suddenly found themselves that Sunday morning at Ethel Waterhouse’s home in Bala Cynwood, Pennsylvania.

  They were week-ending at the Waterhouses, along with Ethel and Dud’s roommate, Myer Forbes, and because naturally both Dudley and Jayne were agnostics (making certain of the differentiation between that and an atheist), they didn’t go to church. And because the whole Waterhouse family were staunch Presbyterians, they all did go — with Myer tagging along too, reluctantly, dutifully, and somewhat envious at Dud’s and Jayne’s having the house to themselves.

  “Hi, friend.” Dudley suddenly appeared in the doorway to the guest room Jayne was occupying. “I brought up some coffee and the Times crossword. Awake?”

  She propped herself up on the pillows (the pillowcases and sheets were blue-and-white-striped jobs, and both she and Dudley remarked: “God, why can’t something remain sacred. Why does everything have to blossom out in colors and stripes and polka dots? What’s wrong with plain white!”) and he sat alongside her while they sipped coffee and tried to think of a three-letter word for “the companions of egoes” and who wrote Things As They Are.

  Whenever it was that the chemistry between them first started reacting on them, it did not seem too long a time to Jayne Gibson, who, without any warning whatsoever, found herself in the perfectly asinine situation of trying not to breathe so loudly, remembering Dudley’s imitation of the Smith girl — and thinking: Oh, look now, Jaynie, migirl, let’s get a grip on ourselves! But to no avail. She was actually panting, though Dudley Q. Davis hardly noticed, for right out of nowhere (or maybe after, out of the corners of his eyes, he had seen the secret and formidable world of woman beginning through the sheer part of Jayne’s nylon nightie, there at the top, the pale brown shade of the nipple’s circle, and the soft mound of lovely white) he found himself faced with the problem of covering a growth which was not as indigenous to him as her protrusions were to her, and certainly not anticipated.

  “Maybe I ought to get us more coffee,” Dudley said tersely.

  She put down the newspaper she had been holding while they both were figuring out the crossword, and she said, “Maybe.” She said it in such a shy, strange and odd little voice, that both of them noticed.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, and his voice too sounded suspended, somehow, or vaguely hushed.

  “Nothing.”

  “Huh?” He leaned forward a little. “Something wrong?”

  “No,” she said, staring into his eyes; their eyes were glued on one another during this exchange. “You sound funny.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know, Dud.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Dud, I said — ”

  “You sound funny,” he said.

  Then he leaned more forward, leaned until his lips brushed hers lightly, and they put their mouths together, gently, feeling their mouths for several slow seconds, their hands not on each other, their arms at their sides, until Dudley Q. Davis lifted his head from hers and said, “Whew!”

  “I feel like saying a cliché,” she whispered dizzily.

  “Don’t say anything,” he said in a husky voice. “We don’t need words.”

  And so, with the biggest cliché, perhaps, of them all, Dudley Q. Davis made tender, fumbling, but perfectly-satisfying-to-both love with the daughter of Charles Gibson — on the vulgar blue-and-white-striped sheets of the Waterhouses, that Sunday morning when everyone else in the house was listening to a sermon on “The Meaning of Prayer” down at the First Presbyterian Church.

  • • •

  “You always hear about it happening,” Dudley told her that, noon, after they had sneaked into New York from Cambridge for the doctor’s report, “but you never think that it could happen to you.”

  She said helplessly, ‘It’s just not that easy to get pregnant. I mean, it’s not supposed to be … These friends of Daddy’s — they tried almost three years. Three years. They used to have to plan the nights they were going to have intercourse. They actually had a schedule for it.”

  “Yeah,” Dudley said, “and the one time we don’t plan happens to be the first time, and the first time happens to be the one time.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He said, “It’s not your fault.”

  “Even the restaurant seems — gloomy,” she said, looking at the murals of bullfights i
n Spain, the matadors in their red capes with their heads thrown back as the fierce animals snarled toward them; and around at the neat white-covered tables, the few patrons digging into their paellas, the trays of cocktails passing on trays, and the electric window sign blinking out at the sunny, cold March streets unnecessarily.

  “It’s better here at night,” he said. “Not many people come to the Village at noon to eat. I guess these people here today work around here.”

  “I was afraid we’d run into my father uptown.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Poor father … He’d die if he knew. And after I wrote him that letter telling him about us.”

  “Stop thinking about it. It doesn’t do any good to think about it.”

  “That sounds like a cliché.” She tried to laugh.

  “Everything does,” Dudley Q. Davis said, “and this will too, Jayne. I love you.”

  “Oh, and I love you, Dud.”

  “We’re in an awful jam, all right. We should have known something crazy like this would happen to us. We’ve been so right for each other so far, so perfect. We should have known something would happen.”

  “Dudley,” she said, “what are we going to do? We’ve got to decide.”

  “I know it. I’m thinking about it right now. It’ll take some phone calls.”

  “I knew a girl once,” she said, “who was three months along and went horseback riding and miscarried. There was something she did with quinine too, but I don’t remember that.”

  Dudley Q. Davis put out his cigarette with an emphatic gesture.

  “C’mon,” he said, “I have a better idea. Let’s get out of here.”

  • • •

  “I’ll have a dry Rob Roy,” Charlie Gibson said to the waiter at the Algonquin; and to Marge, “What’ll you have?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t feel like anything.”

  The waiter went away and Charlie brushed the menu aside and lit a cigarette. He looked very grim. She felt sorry for him, and started to say, “Look, Charlie,” but he spoke first.

  “It’s crowded here this noon.”